EDF Energy, the official electricity supplier of the London 2012 Olympics, will be using tweets sent during the games to gage the “Energy of the Nation”.

The power company will scour the raw Twitter feed looking for content, hash tags and links that relate to the Olympics (and which originate from within the United Kingdom), which it will then analyze using an algorithm designed by Professor Mike Thelwall, from the University of Wolverhampton, and Sosolimited a team of linguistic and data visualization experts from MIT. This algorithm will extract positive and negative words, phrases and emoticons from the tweets and generate an hourly percentage showing how positive (or otherwise) British people are feeling about the games.

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Pundits can't seem to glow enough about Yahoo's new CEO, who has been on the job for less than a week. Marissa Mayer is a Google darling flown the coop and swooped in just as Yahoo shocked shareholders with another quarter of disappointing performance.

It's get to work time, and we've got a to-do list for Mayer -- eight things she should do as soon as humanly possible.

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According to the Bloomsberg News Agency a UK judge has ordered Apple to publish a notice on its website and in various newspapers and magazines (the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, Guardian Mobile magazine, and T3) informing visitors and readers that Samsung did not copy the design of the iPad. The judge, Colin Birss, also stipulated that the notice on Apple’s website should remain there for a minimum of six months.

The order follows Apple’s failed attempt to block sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablets in the United Kingdom and is apparently intended to correct any damaging impressions consumers may have been given about the South Korean company as a result of the litigation.

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According to Ofcom’s ninth annual Communications Market report, more people in the UK are texting on their mobiles than talking. The report, which stretches to 409 pages and covers TV & Audio-Visual, Radio & Audio, Internet & Web-Based Content and Telecoms & Networks, finds that 47 percent of people still make a daily voice call. However, 58 percent now regularly send texts, with the average user sending 200 SMS/MMS messages per month.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the 16-24 age group that leads the way here, with the growth in text messaging partly fuelled by mobile providers including generous or unlimited SMS allowances in their tariffs. Thirty-two percent of people also now regularly use social networks to stay in touch, while 26 percent use some form of instant messaging.

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Like all previous versions of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 8 is highly customizable, so if there’s something about it you don’t like -- something fairly minor that is, rather than the entire OS -- you might be able to change it by installing a third-party app, or making some registry tweaks.

There are a lot more than eight ways to improve Windows 8 of course, but these are some of the ones I’ve found the most useful.

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My colleague Joe Wilcox certainly created a storm when he declared his independence from Apple on July 4th. Annoyed by what he saw as the fruit company’s aggressive patent bullying, which he believes "thwarts competition and takes away consumer choice", he sold his remaining Apple devices, and now refuses to touch anything the company makes.

He’s not alone. The #boycottapple hashtag has gained a fair amount of traction on Google+, Reddit and Twitter and many, many words have been written on the subject. Read Joe’s articles if you need more background.

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Android-owning coffee addicts living in United Kingdom and Canada can, from today, start paying for their brewed beverages and food using a new Starbucks app. Once installed, all you have to do is link it to an existing Starbucks card and order some drinks. The app will display a barcode for the barista to scan, resulting in the total being automatically debited from the linked card.

You can use the app to add some credit (using a credit card or PayPal account), check your balance, view your previous transactions, and track Stars in the My Starbucks Rewards program. You can also transfer credit between cards if you’re running low and a friend is happy to help. If you’re not sure where the nearest Starbucks is, the app will show you on a map. If you lose your phone, or have it stolen, all you need to do is cancel your Starbucks card and that will prevent the finder/thief from enjoying a Venti Doubleshot Caramel Macchiato, or similar, at your expense.

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Apple consistently reinvents iPod nano, rolling out new versions of its tiny player annually since 2005, with the exception of last year. It’s not too much of a stretch to assume we’ll see an updated version this year, out in time for Christmas, and according to Japanese blog Macotakara, it will be a return to the earlier, taller form factor, but with some notable differences.

The blog, which cites a "reliable Chinese source", reports that the new device will be three-quarters the height of the fifth-generation model, with a rectangular (presumably touchscreen) display, a home button like the one found on iPhone and iPad, and a "dedicated new iTunes service", suggesting it may have a working version of iOS onboard.

Macotakara also states that the clip that appears on the back of the current square design (for use during physical activity) will be abandoned, making the new 7th-gen nano much thinner.

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The Apple iPad is the best-selling tablet by quite some margin, but with increasing competition from the likes of Google and Microsoft, its dominance could be under threat. Although the company could (and likely will) make some minor improvements to the iPad at some point -- making it thinner, boosting the camera, and finding a way to reduce its core temperature, for example -- it needs to come up with new variations if it wants to stay on top.

That means going large and producing a ‘MacPad’, which would essentially be a touchscreen, keyboard-less version of the Macbook Air (bringing it into direct competition with Microsoft Surface), or going small, and finally introducing the much rumored iPad mini.

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Malware on Android devices is a real and growing threat, and one that is only likely to worsen. The latest Trojan to be found in the wild is a particularly nasty piece of coding named MMarketPay.A by TrustGo, the mobile security company that discovered it. Believed to have infected more than 100,000 smartphones in China, the Trojan downloads paid apps and videos from Mobile Market (M-Market), China Mobile’s official app store, without the user’s knowledge, resulting in some pretty hefty bills.

The malware is picked up by downloading infected apps from one of nine app stores (nDuoa, GFan, AppChina, LIQU, ANFONE, Soft.3g.cn, TalkPhone, 159.com and AZ4SD) and once installed on a device, it bypasses M-Market’s SMS security step, and begins placing orders and downloading content.

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British Airways faces criticism after unveiling plans to look up frequent fliers on Google as part of a customer service programme called "Know Me".

Two-thousand iPad wielding airline staff will be given access to the data, which will include travel history and, most interestingly of all, photos pulled from Google Images. BA says the idea of the initiative is to be able to offer a more personal service -- the photos will allow staff to greet recognized passengers with a smile when they arrive at the terminal or plane.

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Apple, like all big tech companies, files patents for lots of things. Some are used in products it plans to make, but others are just ideas that may or may not ever come to fruition. For this reason you can never read too much into new patents, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sit up and pay at least some attention to the news that Apple has been granted a broad patent for a head-mounted wearable computing device that sounds rather similar to Google Glass.

While the news might suggest that Apple has simply ripped off Google’s innovation, the truth is the patent was actually filed in October 2006 but just granted now.

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A couple of days ago Microsoft researcher Terry Zink claimed he’d uncovered evidence of Android phones being used as part of a botnet to send spam from Yahoo Mail servers. In his blog post on July 3rd he reported that the spam, which included "androidMobile" in the message header, and "Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android" at the bottom of the emails, was being sent from devices located in Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela. He then went on to speculate that users of the infected phones might have installed Trojanized pirated versions of legitimate apps, and become infected that way.

Security experts Sophos, agreed with his findings after running investigations of its own on the spam messages, but didn’t actually find or test any of the supposed malware itself. Google has since denied that any Android devices have been compromised in this way, stating there was no evidence to prove Zink’s claim, and that the junk messages had just been formatted to look as if they originated on Android handsets.

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A technology journalist friend of mine often makes sweeping statements regarding how well he thinks a new program or piece of hardware will fare, and he’s usually completely wrong. When Ubuntu first arrived, he declared it would kill off Windows and render Microsoft an aging OS irrelevance. When Apple launched the iPad he told everyone who cared to listen that it would be a total failure because no one would want one.

I’m far less prone to making such proclamations, but I think I’m on reasonably safe ground when I say Windows 8 is going to be a dud. No version of Windows will ever be a total failure. Even Vista, which is regarded as one of Microsoft’s least successful operating systems, sold reasonably well, and I’m sure as soon as Windows 8 is released we’ll hear a lot of statistics coming out of Microsoft about how it’s the fastest-selling OS since Windows Whatever. But they’ll be statistics that we’ll have to take with a fair amount of salt.

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Tablets are the hottest computing devices right now, and thanks to the likes of Google Nexus 7  and Microsoft Surface, they’re only going to gain in popularity. In fact, the latest NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report has them on target to surpass notebook shipments by 2016. Not too shabby for a platform that didn’t even really exist before the original iPad launched in April 2010.

The total number of mobile PC shipments for 2012 is estimated at 347 million units, with tablets accounting for around 121 million of those. Notebooks are forecast at 208 million units, with mini-note PCs (netbooks) making up the remaining 18 million shipments.

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